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I have owned a MacBook Pro 17" for around 3 years and it has recently become quite sluggish. I have a small Bootcamp partition installed with Vista. There are 4 users installed on the Mac partition and 1 user on the Vista partition. Only about 2 users are used frequently on the Mac partition and the user on Vista isn't used very often. I want my Mac to run faster generally and also be smoother when playing games without buying anything or upgrading RAM. The games I play are Battlefield 1942 and Call of Duty 4. I play both online and offline. I know that there are ways to make your Mac run faster by having less icons on your dock and removing language packs your don't need. If anyone can help me out by providing clear simple instructions on how to improve my Macs performance without investing in any upgrades that would be great. Thanks.

There is no real 'silver bullet' here. Over time as you install applications etc often times these apps install background or startup services to your system that consume cycles without it necessarily being obvious.

For the games that you are playing, obviously you want to get the latest drivers. Both games are GPU intensive and at the end of the day, your graphics card is what really matters.

Are you noticing performance issues in anything other than gaming? Or is just slow system responsiveness all around? Might be time to go hunting for any processes/apps (as mentioned above) that may be causing you to lose cycles.

I am pretty impressed actually that you can even play COD4 on this system. I have the same model as you, though the 2.33 and I never even thought about trying to run a FPS on my system.

Thanks guys. I will try some of those things. It's a slow system overall. Not incredibly slow but just a bit slow. I was wondering will I notice an increase in system performance and gaming if I remove my Bootcamp partition? It's about 50GB the Bootcamp partition.

Can't begin to answer that without knowing the size of your OS X partition and the amount of used vs free space. Realize that Leopard will use 50-60GB of space for virtual memory if you allow it the freedom to do so. As a system drive begins to fill up, it will slow down some. It just takes the drive longer to access the info farther out on the platter of the drive. For years my recommendation has been to maintain a minimum of 20% free space on any system drive and I personally have kept a minimum of 25% free for many years now.

Following my own advice as an example - my current OS X partition is 300 GB - so my goal is to keep 75 GB minimum free space. I currently have 150 GB of data and I do often hit 60 GB of virtual memory. That totals up to 285 GB which leaves me about 15 GB of space left for data on my system drive.

Keep in mind, this is what I would call "best practice". This is not necessary for everyone to be this extreme. But, if you're trying to squeeze every bit of speed out of a machine ...

I cannot be held responsible for the things that come out of my mouth.
In the Windows world, most everything folks don't understand is called a virus.

A bit of a newb question but how do I find out the size of my OS X partition is? My PC partition is 50GB and when I go into Bootcamp Assistant it says that i've got 296GB. So i've either got 296GB in my OS X Partition or around 246GB which is 296-50=246GB.

For smoothest play of games, you'll need to experiment with the game settings. Most all of your 3D games will have adjustments for resolution, hardware acceleration, anti-aliasing, etc. that you'll need to adjust in order to get the best gameplay from each with the system that you have.

I cannot be held responsible for the things that come out of my mouth.
In the Windows world, most everything folks don't understand is called a virus.